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> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
From the article: >The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has challenged the widely-held assumption that diamond prices could only go up I'll admit I don't know a lot about the diamond market and perhaps I'm misinformed, but how on earth was this a widely held assumption? In a world where people are increasingly aware that De Beers and other companies hold major stockpiles of diamonds solely to keep the price inflated, an…
An assumption can be widely held even if most informed people would dispute it. For example the widely held belief that housing prices will only go up, despite historical and theoretical arguments to the contrary.
As the price of diamond continues dropping, I wonder if people will find more interesting applications of the material and it'll eventually become as mundane as things like steel and aluminium. Besides its hardness, it also has very high thermal conductivity. Diamond is still too expensive to be a bulk material, but I look forward to when things like this become cheap and commonplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Possibly a good time to plug moissanite yet again: http://diamondssuck.com
BUT a friend of mine once said that she would never wear them since they're too chromatic, too much rainbow, therefore too prominent and that to her was a bad taste. I tend to agree with her: expensive everyday jewelry, clothes etc. shouldn't be in your face, but recognizable only on closer inspection.
> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
>> From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones... Yes, for decades they claimed clarity and purity to be indicators of the highest quality. Now that humans can manufacture them with better specs than nature, they're shifting to claim that "natural" is better. In the end it's a pretty carbon lattice.
(Less so for industrial uses, or for inserts into the average person's engagement rings where it's the thought and style rather than the provenance that counts)
As the price of diamond continues dropping, I wonder if people will find more interesting applications of the material and it'll eventually become as mundane as things like steel and aluminium. Besides its hardness, it also has very high thermal conductivity. Diamond is still too expensive to be a bulk material, but I look forward to when things like this become cheap and commonplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Neal Stephenson has a book that assumes such an advance -- it's not a key component of the story, but definitely features large in the title : The Diamond Age.
> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
In other words, I basically agree that diamond prices are subject to artificial scarcity, but give credit to the other side’s point. They have a reasonable and internally consistent argument, even if we find it disagreeable. If you interpret “real” to mean “natural”, their position is reasonable. This isn’t novel - we use “real” and “fake” to refer to “natural” and “artificial” for many other things.